Development advice for a Chapter website

sage
1

Greetings!

I have been tasked with making a new site for an organization that groups its members into Chapters and I was curious to get your input on how to best implement this in my new build?

At first, that sounds pretty simple…just implement with a CPT but these chapters will be more like micro sites rather than just a landing page. Each Chapter will need at least the following:

  • home/landing for the chapter
  • about page
  • dedicated contact form page
  • partner page (listing active partners)

Right now I am thinking of doing a CPT for chapters and making child pages for the subpages. I’m also hoping to automate most of this with ACF fields and templates for each page/subpage. This could get messy after a while with having one CPT and many child pages of some of the post in that post type.

Do you have any thoughts/suggestions on how to best implement this? Your input is much appreciated!

2

It’s not always ideal, but have you considered a Multisite?

3

I have considered a subsite multisite. If I went that route, here are the goals that I would need to meet:

  • design the subsites in a way so that the end user doesn’t see that they left the main site
  • usethe same main menu across all sites “seen some plugins for this”
  • have all subsites in a subdirectory “/chapters”
  • use /chapters as a chapter listing/archive “I could use the get_sites() function to query sites for this”
  • create blog templates for adding new chapters “I have a wpmudev membership…could look into the blog templates plugin”

This would definitely help keep things organized. I’m not sure how I would let the main site be on the main domain but force the subsites to be in a subdirectory while also using that subdirectory as a page…
www.example.com
www.example.com/chapters
www.example.com/chapters/subsite-install

Anyone think of any downsides of using multisite instead of a CPT for organizing chapters for an organization?

4

You can make www.example.com/chapters as an archive/listing page in the ‘main’ site and configure the siteurl for each subsite as: www.example.com/chapters/chapter1, www.example.com/chapters/chapter2, etc.

Or even shorter without the subdir chapters (but still with the www.example.com/chapters listing page in the main site): www.example.com/chapter1, www.example.com/chapter2.

1 Like
5

Will the client need to add new chapters on their own?
I would consider now what kind of flexibility and ease of admin your client has after development is over.

1 Like
6

yeah, if I went multisite then this would be my best bet.

Thank you for your replies!

7

So update on this, I dug deeper into the needs of my client and started mapping out for them what they were asking. After all said and done, chapters only need the landing page. All other thoughts of subpages have been refined into these landing pages or have been dynamically combined into other pages “contact form, sign up form”.

This brings us back to using the WP traditional CPT + archive page model :slight_smile:

Thank you all for your input! I think the only way to effectively accomplish the original plan would have been multisite…but cleaning that up for the client to manage may have been another hurdle…